Think

Opinion pieces offering commentary on various aspects of book culture, publishing and self-publishing.

Here Be Digital Dragons: Lucid Writing Requires Mental Maps

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This post by Douglas Carlson originally appeared on Brevity on 1/18/14.

That slight tremor on August 15, 2013—which passed without much notice in the rest of the world—was the earth shifting at The Georgia Review. On that day we began accepting electronic submissions. On August 18th an essay came in online that caught my eye. But after I read it a couple times, I found myself making a few lukewarm notes in preparation for moving it along to the next reader: “strong start, good closing, fuzzy in the middle—an ambitious essay that lost its focus.” For some reason that I don’t recall now, I decided to print the essay out and give it another try. You know where this is going: I immediately understood what the author was up to and loved the piece. It has been accepted for publication, and the whole incident has given me pause to realize that I don’t think that I read as well—that is, with the same level of perception—from a screen as I do from paper. Nothing against my iPad, which I dearly love, or even the big old Dell on my desk, but when I read at my job I’m evaluating the efforts of working writers, most of whom care and grind and hope. I owe them the courtesy of my complete attention and comprehension.

 

Click here to read the full post on Brevity.

 

Creative Entrepreneur: Business Models For Authors

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This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn site on 7/25/14.

This is a continuation in the author entrepreneur series of articles. Recently, I posted the arc of the indie author from first book to CEO of your global business.

Today we’re focusing on the various business models that authors can use to generate revenue and satisfy customers.

Of course, many authors have day jobs which is a great way to pay the bills and writing can then be for fun or extra income, but this article is aimed at authors who are intent on going full-time in this business.

 

Why do you need to define your business model?

Defining your business model can help keep you focused. Opportunities expand as your profile grows and keeping your business model top of mind can help you say no to things that distract you. [I need to remind myself of this all the time!]

For example, renowned indie author JA Konrath states, “I gave up on public appearances a few years ago, because of diminishing returns. They were indeed fun, but the cost and time away from writing wasn’t worth it to me.”

My business model includes professional speaking as well as being an author, but recently I have started to turn down speaking work in order to focus more on the writing and only taking interesting speaking events, like Sweden in September. I’ll be sharing my business plan at some point soon, but in considering where to focus my efforts, these were the most common business models I discovered – and some people mix and match between them.

 

Business model 1: Non-fiction books with info products, speaking and consulting

 

Click here to read the full post on The Creative Penn.

 

The Seven Deadly Sins of Prologues

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This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on 7/14/14.

To prologue or not to prologue? That is the question. The problem with the prologue is it has kind of gotten a bad rap over the years, especially with agents. They generally hate them. Why? In my opinion, it is because far too many writers don’t use prologues properly and that, in itself, has created its own problem.

Because of the steady misuse of prologues, most readers skip them. Thus, the question of whether or not the prologue is even considered the beginning of your novel can become a gray area if the reader just thumbs pages until she sees Chapter One.

So without further ado…

 

The 7 Deadly Sins of Prologues

Sin #1 If your prologue is really just a vehicle for massive information dump…

This is one of the reasons I recommend writing detailed backgrounds of all main characters before we begin (especially when we are new writers). Get all of that precious backstory out of your system.

This is a useful tactic in that first, it can help us see if a) our characters are psychologically consistent, b) can provide us with a feel for the characters’ psychological motivations, which will help later in plotting.

I have a little formula: background–> motivations –>goals–>a plan–>a detailed plan, which = plot and c) can help us as writers honestly see what details are salient to the plot.

This helps us better fold the key details into the plotting process so that this vital information can be blended expertly into the story real-time.

Many new writers bungle the prologue because they lack a system that allows them to discern key details or keep track of key background details. This makes for clumsy writing, namely a giant “fish head” labeled prologue. What do we do with fish heads? We cut them off and throw them away…unless you are my mother’s Scandinavian family and then they make soup *shivers*.

 

Sin #2 If your prologue really has nothing to do with the main story.

 

Click here to read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

How Short Story Writing & Flash Fiction Gets Judged in Competitions

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This post by Zena Shapter originally appeared on her site on 7/24/14.

As some of you may know, I recently judged the Australian Horror Writers’ Association’s short story and flash fiction competition. It involved reading 154 stories and over 385,000 words. At 12pt Times New Roman font, spaced at 1.5 lines, that was 1,066 pages of writing. Whoa!

I’m so glad I read it all though – thank you for sending in your wonderful stories, everyone! It was a fabulous experience. So fabulous, in fact, that I asked my writers’ group – the amazing Northern Beaches Writers’ Group – what insights they might like to have into the judging process, what might be useful to know when writing to win. I’ve answered their questions below. Hopefully you know all this already, but if you don’t then I hope it helps in some small way.

 

What do judges look for in a story?

The most important thing to realise about competitions, and slush piles, and submission calls, is that the reader reading them has a heck of a lot of reading to do. They are also, generally, reading in their spare time. So sometimes I would sit down with my laptop and a glass of wine at home, and have 30 stories to read but only an hour in which to read them.

I never managed it. 10 stories per hour was my maximum. Still, in that hour I wanted to read as much as possible. Some stories made this easy for me – they flowed well, had an interesting character doing something interesting, and showed me the action happening scene-by-scene, so I thanked them for it with my scoring. Other stories made the hour hard work, with their telling and info-dumping and my struggling to understand what was going on, and they were also scored accordingly.

 

Click here to read the full post on Zena Shapter’s site.

 

How Much My Novel Cost Me

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This post by Emily Gould originally appeared on Medium on 2/24/14.

Writing my first book got me into debt. To finish the next one, I had to become solvent.

IT’S HARD TO WRITE ABOUT BEING BROKE because brokeness is so relative; “broke” people run the gamut from the trust-funded jerk whose drinks you buy because she’s “so broke right now” to the people who sleep outside the bar where she’s whining. But by summer 2012 I was broke, and in debt, and it was no one’s fault but mine. Besides a couple of freelance writing assignments, my only source of income for more than a year had come from teaching yoga, for which I got paid $40 a class. In 2011 I made $7,000.

During that $7,000 year I also routinely read from my work in front of crowds of people, spoke on panels and at colleges, and got hit up for advice by young people who were interested in emulating my career path, whose coffee I usually ended up buying after they made a halfhearted feint toward their tote bag–purses. I felt some weird obligation to them and to anyone else who might be paying attention to pretend that I wasn’t poor. Keeping up appearances, of course, only made me poorer. I’m not sure what the point of admitting all this might be, because I know that anyone who experiences a career peak in his mid-twenties will likely make the same mistakes I did, and it’s not even clear to me that they were all mistakes, unless writing a book is always a mistake, which in some sense it must be.

In 2008 I sold a book-in-progress for $200,000 ($170,000 after commission, to be paid in four installments), which still seems to me like a lot of money. At the time, though, it seemed infinite. The resulting book—a “paperback original,” as they’re called—has sold around 8,000 copies, which is about a fifth of what it needed to sell not to be considered a flop. This essentially guarantees that no one will ever pay me that kind of money to write a book again.

It took me a while to realize that my book had failed. No one ever told me point-blank that it had.

 

Click here to read the full post on Medium.

 

'Juno' Screenwriter Diablo Cody's Advice on Writing, Hollywood & More is Smart & Spot-On

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This article by Rachel Simon originally appeared on Bustle on 7/16/14.

To some people, Diablo Cody disappeared off the face of the earth sometime in 2008, right after she won an Oscar for penning Juno. Sure, they might’ve heard something about a new movie here or there, but when nothing became as big as Juno, they (wrongly) assumed Cody left Hollywood. To those who’ve paid attention, though, it’s clear that the filmmaker has been everywhere these last few years: writing, directing, producing (not to mention giving birth to two kids) and, most recently, sharing her secrets with Glamour’s Cindi Leive about building an “unconventional career path” and what lessons she has for women looking to have their own Juno-like breakthroughs. All ladies, whether filmmakers or not, should take note; these are coming from the woman who’s making a rock star movie with Meryl Streep, after all. Cody’s best pieces of advice:

 

#1. Don’t Pick a Fake Name Until You’re Ready

The woman born as Brook Busey-Maurio changed her name early on in her career, when she was just beginning to blog and wasn’t yet a published author. She chose a “cool and intimidating” pseudonym for the purpose of Internet anonymity, but looking back, making the change so early, before she was established as a writer, “was honestly such a mistake.”

 

#2. If You’re Not Happy With Your Life, Change It

 

Click here to read the full article on Bustle.

 

One Weird Old Trick to Undermine the Patriarchy

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This post by Michelle Nijhuis originally appeared on The Last Word on Nothing on 12/18/13.

My five-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl.

The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.)

But my daughter was determined. She liked the story pretty well so far, but Bilbo was definitely a girl. So would I please start reading the book the right way?

I hesitated. I imagined Tolkien spinning in his grave. I imagined mean letters from his testy estate. I imagined the story getting as lost in gender distinctions as dwarves in the Mirkwood.

Then I thought: What the hell, it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Last Word on Nothing.

 

It is Hard for Publishers to Apply Even Harvard B School Advice in Their Struggle With Amazon

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This post by Mike Shatzkin originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files on 7/15/14.

Harvard Business Review published an article recently by Benjamin Edelman called “Mastering the Intermediaries” which gives advice to businesses trying to avoid some of the consequences of audience aggregation and control by an intermediary. The article was aimed at restaurants who don’t want their fate controlled by Open Table or travel companies who don’t want to be beholden to Expedia. The advice offered is, of course, scholarly and thoughtful. It seemed worth examining whether it might have any value to publishers suffering the growing consequences of so much of their customer base coming to them through a single online retailer.

The author presents four strategies to help businesses reduce their dependence on powerful platforms.

The first suggestion: exploit the platform’s need to be comprehensive.

The author cites the fact that American Airlines’ strong coverage of key routes made its presence on the travel website Kayak indispensable to Kayak’s value proposition. As a result, AA negotiated a better deal than Kayak offered others or than others could get.

Despite some suggestions in the late 1990s that publishers set up their own Amazon (which they subsequently half-heartedly tried to do with no success) and a couple of moves to cut Amazon off by minor publishers that were minimally dependent on trade sales, this tactic has never really been possible for publishers on the print side. Amazon began life by acquiring all its product from wholesalers — primarily Ingram and Baker & Taylor — before they switched some and ultimately most of its sourcing to publishers to get better margin. But the publishers can’t cut off the wholesalers without seriously damaging their business and their relationships with other accounts, and the wholesalers won’t cut off Amazon. So for printed books, still extremely important and until just a couple of years ago the dominant format, this strategy is not worth much to publishers.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Shatzkin Files.

 

Why Writers Are Opening Up About Money (or the Lack Thereof)

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This article by Anna North originally appeared on The New York Times Opinion Pages on 7/21/14.

Writers may always have worried about money, but now seems a particularly fertile time for writing about it. Scratch Magazine, launched last year, takes as its purview “Writing + money + life.” The Billfold routinely runs stories on how freelance writers and other creative types “do money.” The novelist Emily Gould opened up about her financial life in a popular Medium essay and subsequent interviews, and The Guardian’s Alison Flood recently reported on the sorry state of writers’ incomes (which, in turn, inspired some critique from Gawker’s Michelle Dean).

This spate of talk about writing and money has opened up broader conversations about who can afford to enter the profession today, and who gets shut out.

Manjula Martin, the cofounder of Scratch, told Op-Talk that “there has always been this tension for writers around how to make a living and how to make art.” However, she said, growing job insecurity in writing professions and beyond may have led to a new wave of anxiety: “As the economy is changing and as things just feel more precarious in our culture, that bleeds through to the literary culture. And I think a big part of that too is a question of, ‘is literature and are the arts going to continue to be valued in ways that we have perhaps always just assumed they would be?’”

 

Click here to read the full article on The New York Times Opinion Pages.

 

Censorship War: Website Unmasks Links Google is Blocking From Search Results

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This post originally appeared on RT.com on 7/17/14.

A subversive website has been launched to keep track of news and other webpages Google has “censored” from the search engine’s index, following the European Court of Justice’s controversial Right to be Forgotten ruling.

The tech giant has reportedly been inundated with 70,000 requests to remove sensitive information from its search results in the aftermath of the ECJ’s decision. While this data may be accurate, it is considered “irrelevant” and possibly defamatory under the EU policy shift.

In a mark of protest against online censorship, a new site ‘Hidden From Google’ has begun archiving links censored by search engines intent on complying with ECJ demands. The site was set up by US web developer and transparency advocate, Afaq Tariq.

The New Jersey developer asserts the removal of links from a search engine’s index amounts to censorship. So in an effort to preserve transparency in Europe’s online realm, he invites visitors to log data that has been removed from Google on the site.

“This list is a way of archiving the actions of censorship on the Internet,” Tariq states on the site’s about page. “It is up to the reader to decide whether our liberties are being upheld or violated by the recent rulings by the EU.”

 

Click here to read the full post on RT.com.

 

12 Tips for Writing Blog Posts That Get Noticed

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This post by Jodie Renner originally appeared on The Kill Zone on 7/14/14.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t possibly get to all the blogs I’d like to in any given day. We’re all busy people, so we want to know within seconds whether a blog post will offer anything of value to our hectic lives. And we might even get annoyed at time-wasters that meander or don’t deliver on their promises.

Blogging is a great way to build a community feeling, connect with readers and writers, and get your books noticed. I’m honored and proud to be a member of this award-winning group blog, The Kill Zone, where my fellow bloggers, all savvy, accomplished writers, offer daily value and entertainment to writers, and our community of eager participants enrich every post with insightful comments.

But if you’re just getting started in the world of blogging and want to build a following, the most important thing to remember is that it’s not about you. It’s all about offering the readers value in an open, accessible style and format. A rambling, unclear, too formal, or overly long blog post can be irritating or boring – a turnoff. And can jeopardize your reputation or blog.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes 12 specific tips with details on each, on The Kill Zone.

 

Paying Writers What they Deserve

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 7/12/14.

Traditional Publishing is no Longer Fair or Sustainable. This was the sad but accurate headline in The Guardian this week. It followed a report on author income from the ALCS, the results of which led Nicola Solomon, head of the UK’s Society of Authors to declare:

Authors need fair remuneration if they are to keep writing and producing quality work. Publisher profits are holding up and, broadly, so are total book sales if you include ebooks, but authors are receiving less per book and less overall due mainly to the fact that they are only paid a small percentage of publishers’ net receipts on ebooks and because large advances have gone except for a handful of celebrity authors.

This comes right on the heels of The Daily Mail’s piece about Hillary Clinton’s latest book. The memoir has sold well by most measures, moving 161,000 copies in the first three weeks and 86,000 in week one, but the book has dropped in the charts, and it appears Simon & Schuster will take a loss due to the $14,000,000 advance paid to Hillary.

Forteen million dollars.

By publishing math, this advance was warranted. Her previous book sold well enough for the bean counters at S&S to come up with what seemed necessary to both retain Hillary and turn a profit. But this methodology flies in the face of recent rhetoric about the role publishers play in the protection of literature and the nurturing of “the writing life.”

With that sum of money, you could pay 500 writers $28,000 to enjoy a full year of the writing life. Or you could pay 250 writers $56,000 if they don’t understand how to squeak by as a starving artist. Not only that, Hillary Clinton doesn’t need another penny for as long as she lives. She didn’t need to be supported while she wrote the book. So how exactly are publishers the patrons of the literary arts? Nicola Soloman nails the problem with the current blockbuster model of entertainment: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. We shovel money at the outliers and drop everyone else.

 

Click here to read the full post on Hugh Howey’s site.

 

3 Takeaways for Writers from the 2014 World Domination Summit

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This post by Jane Friedman originally appeared on her site on 7/15/14.

This past weekend, I attended the World Domination Summit (WDS) in Portland, which attracts 3,000 creative people who are concerned with answering the question: “How do we live a remarkable life in a conventional world?” They are guided by three values:

1. Community
2. Service
3. Adventure

Speaking personally, I’m really into the first two, as well as the third when it’s tied to travel and experiencing new cultures. (Some of the attendees are really into physical adventure.)

The weekend was full of insightful and passionate talks by accomplished people from around the world. Here are three takeaways I was left with.

 

1. You don’t need to have it all figured out to take the first step.

Some creative people get tripped up and never start things because they can’t envision how they’ll tackle a seemingly insurmountable project. And they can get paralyzed by everything they don’t know. Some people want to feel safe and take action that reduces risk or feels comfortable.

 

Click here to read the full post on Jane Friedman’s site.

 

Kindle Book Pricing and How the Big Guys Don’t Get It.

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This post by Dennis Blanchard originally appeared on the K1YPP blog on 7/10/14.

I love to read. For some reason, as a young reader, I missed many of the classics. I’ve made up for lost time over the years by “catching up.” Books like The Catcher In The Rye, Of Mice And Men, White Fang and On The Road have been books that I’ve only read in the last twenty years or so. The same goes for movies, I’ve caught up on The African Queen, Casablanca, The Godfather and others in the last few years. How did I miss them? I don’t know, perhaps I just spent so much time outside when I was younger, I just missed them. That is a subject for another time.

Yesterday, I read a news piece on CNN about an author that was gored running with the bulls in Pamplona. Bill Hillmann, author of “Fiesta, How To Survive The Bulls Of  Pamplona.” How ironic. It occurred to me that I had not read anything much by Hemingway recently, so I decided to take a look online and see if I could find his book, “The Sun Also Rises.” I figured that, surely, by now, it must be on Kindle for an inexpensive price, or perhaps, even free. Surely.

 

Click here to read the full post on the K1YPP blog.

 

"I'll Do It Myself!"

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This post by Kate Siegel Bandos originally appeared on San Francisco Book Review on 6/26/14.

Those of us who were raised with classic nursery rhymes and stories know it was The Little Red Hen who said, “I’ll do it myself…and she did.” (http://www.storybus.org/stories_and_activities/the_little_red_hen/story)

Also, anyone who has been around a two-year-old may hear “I’ll do it myself!” multiple times a day.

However, when an author continually says to me, “I’ll do this myself…I’ll do that myself,” I now try to gently explain to them how this might be detrimental to them and their book.

The reality in publishing is that there aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the week for one person to do it all themselves.

Do you fix your own car? Do you cut your own hair? Do you make all your clothes? Do you grow ALL your own food? Few of us are a “jack of all trades.”

So when you are deciding to write, design, publish, promote, and market your book, and handle everything yourself, think again. Be aware of your strengths and outsource your weaknesses.

 

Click here to read the full post on San Francisco Book Review.